Author: billysinker

The Bible is full of stories that on the surface may seem theatrical and entertaining, yet in entertaining these stories further, a new interpretation is uncovered. I feel as if this is particularly true in the book of Genesis. Some of the most famous and crucial stories that form the foundation of the Bible are found in Genesis- they are also extremely short. For example, the story of Cain and Abel is only sixteen lines, however, its implicit meaning gives it life. 

The life of the story of Cain and Abel is a representation of several binaries. The very nature of the title is binary by the use of two brothers. Although many binaries can be examined, I will look at the idea of doing what is right vs. doing what is wrong in the sense of moral action. 

Cain and Abel are brothers. They are the first brothers in the history of mankind. Cain “cultivates the earth” and Abel was a “shepherd.” The story follows as such: 

“When it was time for harvest, Cain presented some of his crops as a gift to the Lord. Abel also brought a gift– the best portions of the firstborn lambs from his flock. The Lord accepted Abel and his gift, but he did not accept Cain and his gift. This made Cain very angry, and he looked dejected.” 

Cain’s anger seems justifiable. Why would the Lord accept his brother, Abel’s gift, but not his own? I can only imagine the self-doubt, angst, and lack of confidence the Lord’s unapproved must have bestowed upon Cain. He watched as his brother, with seemingly the same type of offering, was accepted by the Lord while he was left with nothing. 

Looking through Cains’ eyes, this cruelty from the Lord seems to me as a representation of the cruelty of nature. Whether or not you believe in a God, or a higher power influencing your life and the lives around you, the moral of the story can be understood. 

We all have had days where we feel as if the laws of nature are working against us, despite whether our intentions, work ethic, and spirit are all in accordance and aligned towards achieving our goal, but still some higher power is stopping us from reaching it. 

I feel as if this is how Cain is receiving the Lord’s denial of his offering. Following a moment like this, we as humans can become dejected like Cain, or we can continue to act with the same positive intentions, work ethic, and spirit. And this is the same message God feeds to Cain: 

“Why are you so angry?” the Lord asked Cain. “Why do you look so dejected? You will be accepted if you do what is right. But if you refuse to do what is right, then watch out! Sin is crouching at the door, eager to control you. But you must subdue it and be its master.” 

The Lord offers Cain the wisdom that he must be the master over his depression and anger, or it will consume him. The Lord implies that Cain “will be accepted” if he just does what is right. The Lord never states that Cain’s offering was wrong or not enough, thus perhaps it was a challenge to test Cain’s faith and character. 

This story, from likely thousands of years ago, still rings true today. Despite its brevity, when uncovered, it provides the wisdom that still persists to this day. Cain’s true colors shine through when he is faced with a bit of strife and overcome with the vice of envy over his brother. We all endure challenges in our daily goals and missions. We all experience unfair outcomes for other people or feel as if our sacrifices for others are not acknowledged, similar to how God did not acknowledge Cain’s sacrifice. Yet the correct response is to stay true to your mission and do what is right, for following the alternative path is to fall victim, or slave, to your vices. 

In the early years, I viewed the Holy Bible as just a book that had some sort of mystique to it, a judgmental aurora, an essence of power. 

I grew up in a “kind of” religious family. However, we would only go to church on holidays, and even that half-efforted attempt of faith fizzled out as my sisters, and I began to assume our sovereignty. 

I always felt the messages to be obsolete and unable to be understood through all the fancy dress, decorations, and sacraments. I never felt a spiritual connection in my time in the Catholic Church. 

In contrast to my family, my best friend’s family is very religious. The type of religion that other people, even myself, view as obnoxious or misguided. However, I always admired their passion for their faith; and my relationships with their family allowed me to experience faith differently. 

My friend’s family attended a nondenominational Christian church that read and interpreted the Bible in a way that I was not familiar with. So I spent several months being very devoted and making an effort to read the Bible and do as much as possible with the church. 

The beauty that came with uncovering this type of version of Christianity versus what I had been used to in Catholicism. Comparing my friend’s family with my own family, I learned more about how the Bible has worked following society. 

I observed how there were many different and more appealing ways of celebrating and worshipping God. Yet, the one constant was the Bible. 

I also observed through reading the Bible that my family was just as religious as my friends’ family. Without blatantly speaking religiously, my family’s values and attitudes were apparent through stories and wisdom articulated in the text.  

Despite all of the diversity of all these things, the one thing that all of these things had in common was they are all based on this book. Hundreds and thousands of years, and this book was still standing. Hundreds of thousands of years and new interpretations are still forming every day. 

When I got to Dickinson, I began reading and learning more about English literature. I read countless poetry and prose with allusions to biblical stories. I learned about how the first manuscripts of Shakespeare and John Donne were made, how they persisted, and subsequently how nothing came close to perpetuating time quite like the stories in the Bible. 

 My interest in the Bible lies in my fascination with faith and spirituality. Specifically in how it expresses wisdom on human nature. Also, I am fascinated by the historical aspect of Christianity and how atrocities are justified by specific interpretations of the Bible. 

I am also moved and humbled by the power of literature. It fascinates me how some stories and books can perpetuate time like Shakespeare, Homer, Aristotle, and the Holy Bible. I feel as if there is great power and influence in these works that touch a certain part of our spirits and beings we may not comprehend. Given this, I feel it is important to study and work to understand these texts- even if that understanding comes from the paradoxical wisdom of Socrates “The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing.” 

I also heard this quote a few years ago and believe it captures this power: 

“Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love, and at this hour, millions of men would die for him.”

 

 

Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, lived from 1813 to 1855. In his work, Fear, and Trembling, he engages with the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of his son Issac. 

Scholars point to Kierkegaard’s exploration of literary figures like Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and Faust during his time as a student as an early pretext for his desire to find existential models for his own life. He is now widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. His theories and ideas contributed largely to Western philosophical thought. 

However, his existential beliefs revolve in large part around his love Regina Olsen. Scholars believe that Kierkegaard’s experience of love and the loss of love directly influences Fear and Trembling. 

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard says that “I am convinced that God is love…” (Fear and Trembling). He takes Abraham and Issac’s story as metaphorically tied with parts of the human experience rather than being a literal anecdote on the necessity of physical sacrifice. In this essay, I will connect Abraham’s intention to sacrifice Issac to Kierkegaard’s wrestling with the idea of love from his own experiences. In conjunction, these two scenarios serve to illuminate the more significant concept of selfless love in the Bible. 

In the first part of the book, Kierkegaard gives alternative examples and auxiliary stories of what happened on Mount Moriah. In the first interpretation, Abraham scolds his son and tells him that he desires to sacrifice him rather than God’s. Shortly after that, he cries out to God: “Lord in heaven, I thank you; it is surely better for him to believe I am a monster than to lose faith in you” (Kierkegaard 9). Thus, Abraham portrays to his son that he is assuming responsibility for killing him instead of leaving the responsibility to fall on God. In doing so, Abraham prevents his son from losing faith in higher sovereignty by making the decision a personal one. 

Kierkegaard’s existential views spur significantly from the sense of loss and despair he felt after his separation from Regina. Thus, this quote reflects Kierkegaard’s plea to humanity not to blame the love itself for its failure but instead blame oneself through the mouth of Abraham. 

The second section of the book is titled, A Tribute to Abraham. On the surface, the passage speaks to the moral perfection of Abraham. Yet, it more generally describes the qualifications for a perfectly righteous man and the force of love and its significance to humanity. He ties the genuine struggle with God to achieving greatness over all others. “For the one who struggled with the world became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with himself became great by conquering himself, but the one who struggled with God was greater than everybody” (Kierkegaard 13). 

His struggle with his loss of love allowed Kierkegaard to see the finitude of life. Similar to Abraham, Kierkegaard wrestled with God, or love, in the surrendering of that thing in which they loved. For Abraham, it was Issac, and for Kierkegaard, it was Regina. Abraham struggled with God, Kierkegaard with love by coming to terms with the idea of love in its most brutal state. They both loved the one whom they were ready to lose. Kierkegaard believed that love in its purest form was utterly unselfish, an idea repeated in the Bible repeatedly. For Abraham to be willing to sacrifice his son reinforced the concept of this selfless love. To love someone dead, or lost, would mean that you can not receive anything in return. 

Kierkegaard’s writing on Abraham in Fear and Trembling shares parallels to his own life. The willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, one of his most loved possessions, represents the highest form of love. Likewise, Kierkegaard’s love of Regina, who he lost, is also the highest form of love he could give her. Thus, in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s life is paralleled to Abrahams by the metaphor of sacrifice and selfless love. 

As a part of my independent reading, I turned to the Old Testament’s first story, known as the “Creation Story” in the Book of Genesis. The very first line of the Bible begins with a binary: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Heaven and Earth are in a dance with each other, as are light and darkness. In terms of this essay, I will focus on the binary of light and dark introduced in the following few lines; yet, I believe light is synonymous with Heaven and darkness is synonymous with Earth. The interplay of these two binaries is evidence of how complicated a binary allows us as readers to “discover evidence that unsettles it and formulate alternatively worded binaries that more accurately describe what is at issue in the evidence” (Writing Analytically, 60). I will not dive into the nature of the relationship of the two binaries in this essay; however, binaries as a literary mechanism is at play in establishing the framework for the book of Genesis, and arguably- the entirety of the Bible.

“The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters./ Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness,” (Genesis 1:2-5).

The narrative introduces darkness as being primary. Earth is “formless and empty” until God introduces light, revealing the structure of nature. A few lines later, the speaker says that the orchestrator saw the light as good, separating light from the darkness. In these lines, the introduction of the binary of good and evil takes place. The text does not explicitly state darkness as being evil. However, its separation from something good implies that it is, if not anything else, not that which is good. The OED defines darkness as “a condition or environment which conceals from sight, observation, or knowledge; obscurity; concealment, secrecy,” and the darkness has several associations with death throughout other books of the Old Testament (OED). 

Once there is light, it follows that God perceived the light to be “good” (Genesis 1:4). Initially, I read this as the light itself is good; however, another interpretation can be proper. I assert that that which is brought to light as the lights come on is good. For God see’s what the light presents. The OED defines light as “that natural agent or influence which evokes the functional activity of the organ of sight” (OED). Light enables the revelation of what one visual cortex can see. Light and whatever it reveals are dependent on each other. Thus, the light is good in itself, and that which it illuminates is also good. 

The story of Genesis is instrumental in establishing many general motifs that are ubiquitous in both the Old and New Testaments. Binaries such as good and evil; light and darkness; life and death; Heaven and Earth; are all present in the first six lines of the story. Therefore, it is essential to identify these binaries and establish their origin. Within these six lines, a more general and potentially obvious binary of light and darkness led me to discover Heaven and Earth acting as a binary. Equipping myself with the presupposition that Heaven and Earth could be working in direct opposition to one another will allow me to reinterpret many important stories in the Bible and potentially reveal insight that I could not see prior.

In this week’s blog, I decided to read and analyze Psalm 91 of the Old Testament. The Psalm relies on imagery and metaphors of nature to articulate a sense of hope for trusting in “God” (91:1). The nature of this metaphor resembles similar metaphors that exist in Micheal Field’s, Underneath the Bough– where the environmental nature connects to human nature. 

The Psalm establishes a symbolic presentation of the life of a bird and our own human life. The song first begins with an allusion to extraneous stories in the Bible. For example, “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High/ will rest in the shadow of the Almighty” (91:2). A reference to “Most High” alludes to other mentions of God in the Bible; however, literally, the highest place of dwelling would be trees, directly connecting birds to the song (91:1). Birds have a distinct physical trait that distinguishes them from any other animal– that is — they can fly. Due to their ability to dwell in the air and high places like trees, their natural being separates them and protects them from many dangers that lurk on the surface of the Earth. In the eyes of humans, they seem to be protected by this seemingly magical ability. Thus, birds are a perfect metaphorical partner to God-protected humans, as they share a seemingly magical presence of protection. 

The metaphor to birds become more explicit in the proceeding lines: 

“Surely he will save you/ from the fowler’s snare/ He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings, you will find refuge;/ …You will not fear/…the arrow that flies by day” (91:5-12). 

The bird imagery begins with “the fowler’s snare” (91:6). A fowler, according to Merriam Webster, is a person who hunts wildfowl. A snare is the typical type of trap used to capture birds and other small animals. 

The song uses these metaphors to construct a representation of evil that resides in everyday life. However, the “feathers” of the Almighty will protect all who take shelter underneath his wings (91:8). Thus, the song uses the metaphor of a bird’s wings protecting other birds to God’s protection over humans. 

Even those who “dwell in the shelter of the Most High” will not fear the “arrow that flies by day” (91:1,12). Humans historically used arrows for hunting birds. We have evolved from a hunting and gathering society, so arrows were a way to capture food. Despite this, birds would have continued to fly through the air– without an ounce of fear. In these lines, the arrows symbolize the similar threats that we face in everyday life. Hardships like death, malice, heartbreak, disease, tragedy, and every other adversity humans face. Yet, like birds, humans would have no fear with the “trust” in “the Almighty” (91:4,2). 

Nature presents many natural metaphors that connect to human nature. Similar to Micheal Field’s Underneath the Bough, Psalm 91 uses natural elements, specifically birds, to articulate and perpetuate ideas of hope for humans. The bird metaphor in this Psalm speaks to the power the “Most High” possesses in protecting those who love the Lord (91:1).

Micheal Fields’ poem “AH, Eros…,” on the bottom of page eight, illustrates the beauty and honor in chivalry; and illuminates masculine courage in the face of unjust desires through the use of dictation and imagery. 

The poem begins with an introduction of Eros, the Greek god of erotic love. In the first quatrain, Eros’ is shown to have the ability to overcome men and dictating their sexual interactions. In the proceeding line of the first quatrain, the power of Eros is at work with “…smite/ With cruel, shining dart,/ Whose bitter point with sudden might,… (8). The imagery and diction in these lines reveal the “dart” and “point” represent a penis, unexpectedly and with cruel intentions interacting with a woman. When this interaction occurs, with Eros’s power-consuming the male and dictating his actions, the woman is left with an “unhappy heart–” (8). 

The woman is not only left with an unhappy heart, but her innate “purple-stained” purity is forever lost (8). The color purple represents wealth, wisdom, dignity, and many other positive traits, and those are all lost when a man cruelly interjects with her. 

Yet, Eros’s power is not invincible. It takes a courageous man to resist Eros temptations of erotic love and reside to more chivalrous interaction that leads to more mutual love and appreciation.  

The final quatrain begins with a call of hope. “O’er it sometimes the boy will deign” (8). This first line reveals that sometimes the boy, possessed by Eros power, will deem his submission to his desires beneath his dignity and resist cruelly pursuing erotic love. Instead, he decides to “Sweep the shaft’s feathered end;” and put away his cock. Also, the rhythmic pattern ties together the word “end” and “descend,” which produces the imagery that reveals the surrender of his sexual devices. 

Finally, the last two lines reveal the rise of a long-term intimate relationship through “friendship,” which comes in place of resisting a destructive short-term form of pleasure. Finally, the word choice reveres the act of resisting Eros’s sexual temptation in the final line. “White plumes” at the time of publication were used as symbols of public shaming and cowardice. If a white plume descended or fell to the ground, so too would the cowardice, and what would rise would be a courageous, chivalrous man. 

This specific poem’s meaning fits into the overarching premise of Book I. The poems share imagery and metaphors that reveal a deep appreciation for the order and beauty of nature, environmental nature, and human nature. “AH, Eros…” uses specific diction to unravel one of the most curious pieces of human nature; that being, love and intimacy. This particular passage engages with “being’s law” and the laws that govern us as humans (20.) Similar to how all other sounds in nature repeal the laws of the wind, humans too have laws that guide their being and situate them in the universe (7).